by Gal Luft

About the author: Gal Luft is a former lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces and the author of The Palestinian Security Forces: Between Police and Army.

Never in Israel’s history, to paraphrase former British prime minister Winston Churchill, has so much harm been inflicted on so many by so few. Since the onset of the second intifada [Palestinian uprising] in late September 2000, dozens of exploding humans—Palestinian H-bombs—have rocked the Jewish state and transformed the lives of its people. As little as a year ago, suicide bombings were seen as a gruesome aberration in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an expression of religious fanaticism that most Palestinians rejected. But a new, unsettling reality has emerged: the acceptance and legitimation of the practice among all Palestinian...